There is no genre of restaurant that more efficiently extracts money from its customers than modern American steakhouses.

(Former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin is back in the news. He's standing trial for 21 counts of bribery, wire fraud and conspiracy. It is not the first time his judgment has been called into question. Back in 2008, I took the former mayor to task for exercising, among other things, questionable taste while dining out lavishly on the taxpayers' dime. He was not the last Louisiana politician to do so. The complete text of my earlier story, published May 30, 2008, follows.)

In the two weeks since the story broke, a lot of ink has been devoted to the taxpayer-financed spending proclivities of Mayor Ray Nagin's top aides.

Considering the known details -- more than $150,000 spent in six months on fun-sounding travel, nightclub parties and really expensive steaks, over half of it by two key mayoral sidekicks -- the uproar should surprise no one.

I know what you're thinking: Why am I reading about "Checkgate" in the restaurant column? Because this restaurant columnist has something in common with the spendthrifts that most of my colleagues -- and I presume many readers -- do not: an expense account.

On a certain level, I am ashamed to admit, I can relate.

As Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, a former restaurant critic at The New York Times, wrote in her memoir "Comfort Me With Apples": "I found the primary requisite for writing about food to be a credit card."

And indeed, as journalistic endeavors go, it can get pricey.

While extravagant meals on the job are rare, the privilege of dining out on someone else's dime can erode one's wits, regardless of the real cost. When I learned that communications director Ceeon Quiett charged $3,897 on a taxpayer-financed credit card at Morton's Steakhouse, my first response was a kind of admiration. I couldn't get that kind of tab rubber-stamped to save my life.

But the appreciation didn't last long.

Let us, for the sake of argument, disregard that these extravagances were likely enjoyed, at least in part, alongside City Council members with whom the mayor's office only grudgingly engages during normal business hours.

The administration has thus far refused to make public exactly what was being lavished upon whom on the taxpayer dime, so let us also assume that the public benefit of dropping nearly four grand at a steakhouse -- not to mention $2,800 at Ray's Over the River nightclub -- is manifest.

Setting all that aside, I still have to ask: Morton's? On the city's dime?

My experience with politicians and eating in steakhouses is more extensive than you might expect of someone with marginal manners and a limited income. I lived in Washington, D.C., for five years in the mid- to late- '90s, when chain steakhouses such as Morton's, Smith & Wollensky and the Capital Grille were hot spots. That they were also relatively well-reviewed never struck me as a huge surprise.

This was before the nation's capital enjoyed a culinary renaissance, back when ambitious chefs and restaurateurs grumbled about the meat-and-potato tastes of the expense-account class -- namely the politicians and operatives who chose where the lobbyists would treat them to dinner -- with some justification.

Yet they couldn't deny that the steakhouses delivered precisely what these diners wanted: an ego hangar where the food is consistent but not show-stealing, and where the prices leave little ambiguity about the transaction completed when one member of a party picks up the check.

There is no genre of restaurant that more efficiently extracts money from its customers than modern American steakhouses. The concept may strike those who pay for their own meals as absurd, but this is part of their appeal.

When someone buys you dinner at a steakhouse, you are being made to feel that you are worthy of such a price tag. And the purchaser receives something arguably more valuable: the opportunity to flaunt and potentially exercise economic power.

Is it such a surprise that when two of the area's most conspicuous consumers -- restaurateur Al Copeland and casino millionaire Robert Guidry -- came to blows, it was on the dining room floor of a New Orleans steakhouse? The very one, in fact, where Quiett picked up the check for the four-figure dinner.

I stopped in for dinner last week. My friend and I ordered steaks, both perfectly prepared: a filet Oskar ($42.50) and a "Cajun" spiced rib-eye ($39.50), the second least expensive steak on the menu. The oysters Rockefeller was abominable: barely seasoned wilted spinach over warm bivalves that weren't from Louisiana. According to our waitress, Morton's doesn't serve local crab or shrimp either. The small lobster tail ($41.50) we shared was from Australia.

We ordered glasses of wine instead of delving into the pricey list of bottles. We split dessert, an upside-down apple pie. The final tab: $331.35.

We took it easy, and it was still as much as I've spent on dinner for two at any New Orleans restaurant this calendar year.

Symbolism is integral to politics, and spending taxpayer money is a political act. The mayor and his advisers help control the purse strings of a city that lives to eat. They're under the false impression that money is no object, and, if that's not galling enough, they don't even know how to spend it properly.